This is the surviving courtyard of the Almohad mosque, and its geometry is the mosque's rather than the cathedral's. The orange trees are planted on a grid, and the irrigation channels between them still run.
⭐ The fountain at the centre is older than everything around it — a reused Visigothic basin, in place for the ritual washing that preceded prayer.
It is the one part of the complex where the building that stood here first is still legible as a plan rather than as a fragment.
Our tip
Stand at the corner and look along the rows rather than across them. The grid only reads from the diagonal.
Patio de los Naranjos, photographed
